Wilfred Owen: Portraits, Manuscripts and the Places That Remain

This photograph of Owen in uniform appeared as the frontispiece to Poems in 1920, two years after his death. The exposure itself must be earlier than November 1918; the exact sitting date is not supplied. This digital copy was converted to grayscale, with later minor speck cleanup and darkening by Adam Cuerden.

Glyn Warren Philpot painted this portrait of Siegfried Sassoon in 1917. It is an oil painting, reproduced here, rather than a photograph. Sassoon’s encouragement and criticism mattered to Owen’s development at Craiglockhart; after Owen’s death, he introduced the first published collection of his poems.

Owen included this draft of “The Dead Beat” in a letter to his cousin Leslie Gunston in August 1917. The handwritten lines put the poem back into the working life of its author: correspondence, revision and the attempt to make an experience readable. The date belongs to the manuscript, not to the modern scan.

This manuscript of “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is cataloged as a final draft penned by Owen in 1917. Its digital history runs through Jon Stallworthy’s printed edition and the Oxford archive. The sheet preserves a particular stage in the poem’s making; it does not show the whole sequence of drafts and revisions.

Marc Ryckaert photographed Owen’s grave at Ors on June 29, 2006. The headstone records his rank, regiment, Military Cross and death on November 4, 1918. This modern photograph documents the cemetery as preserved, eighty-eight years after the canal crossing; it is not an image of the burial.